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Have you been following the China trade deal? There are lots of pieces to this puzzle, but its been a story mainly about opaque Chinese politics rather than economics – but then I’ve always thought trade deals were 90% politics and 10% economics. While Trump has been saying that it amounts to a little squabble, the Chinese are calling ‘a people’s war‘.

There have always been powerful interests in China who were going to oppose ending subsidies, ending theft of intellectual property, and who wanted to continue a one-sided relationship. The best analysis I’ve seen is Gordon Chang’s “No Longer a Trade Tiff: China Screams ‘People’s War’“

It’s about time! Wilfred M. McClay has decided it’s time to take back history from the dominance of Howard Zinn, who disparaged America in his history books and wrote with an extreme, Leftist perspective. His books still dominate the market; his publisher claims over two million in sales (nine years after Zinn died). Although Professor McClay will not be able to change the history education of our children overnight, he has taken a major step in providing a balanced view of American History.

In an Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (it may be behind a pay wall so I cite a number of other articles here), McClay decries the current state of history textbooks:

I hate to admit this, but MacGyver is not good. I’m not referring to the unwatchable reboot currently withering away on CBS. No, I mean the original Richard Dean Anderson vehicle of awesomeness which aired from 1985-1992.

Dat dat dat dat dat dat daaaaa, dat dat daaaaa. The theme song gets you pumped, right? It makes we want to go rifling through the kitchen junk drawer, grab the broken can openers and fashion a defibrillator, just in case we need one. Or take the mercury out of those unused curly cue light bulbs (still in the four-year-old box, because they suck) and make…something with mercury, and batteries!

I write a weekly book review for the Daily News of Galveston County. (It is not the biggest daily newspaper in Texas, but it is the oldest.) After my review appears on Sunday, I post the previous week’s review here on Sunday.

Retired from the U.S. Army Reserve as a Colonel after 30 years of active and reserve assignments. M.A. Political Science, M.S. Strategic Studies, Army War College, JD. Served in 1st Armored Division in West Germany when the Berlin Wall came down, in 2nd Infantry Division in South Korea during the regime of Kim Il Sung, and commanded a logistics battalion in Iraq 2003-2004. Wide-ranging public policy interests. Occasional home brewer and infuser of alcohol spirits.

Johns Hopkins was born on this day, May 19, 1795. A Marylander, his Quaker parents lived out their religious beliefs by freeing their slaves. This cost them greatly and led them to put their son into their tobacco fields at age 12, ending his formal education. Yet, Johns Hopkins not only overcame the economic disadvantages imposed on him by his parents, but also overcame the natural human impulse to hate the “other,” the people with darker skin who society and his personal experience would tell him to blame. From a poor start in his parents’ tobacco fields, after transplantation to the merchantile field, Johns Hopkins blossomed into a business leader, then grew other businesses through investment, finally creating seedbeds from which amazing new ideas bloomed.

Michael Ramirez is a two-time winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1994 and 2008 and a three-time Sigma Delta Chi, Society of Professional Journalism Award winner. He is a Senior Editor and the editorial cartoonist for Investor's Business Daily. Ramirez is a Lincoln Fellow, an honorary member of Pi Sigma Alpha National Political Science Honor Society, and has won almost every journalism award in addition to the prestigious UCI Medal from the University of California, Irvine and the 2005 N… [more]

One of the constants on this podcast from the very start has been Game of Thrones. That’s despite the fact that one of the hosts can’t stand the show. That’s why when we really want to get into the weeds on the how, we call in two experts on the genre and the show: the Free Beacon’s Sonny Bunch and the New York Times’ Ross Douthat. Together with John and Jonah, they parse the good, the bad, what worked and what didn’t. Needless to say, this episode of GLoP contains MAJOR Game of Thrones spoilers so if you have not seen the series finale, you should not listen to this podcast until you have.

I'm a fifty-something father of six who divides his time between writing industrial automation software and opining cantankerously about the precariousness of western civilization and the enemies, many unwitting, arrayed against it. I'm fascinated by words, evolution, emergent behavior, the challenge of Islam, the absurdity of the trans movement, and saving the most successful nation and culture in history. I'm a climate empiricist: I'll believe in global warming when I see evidence of global… [more]

I think I did alright in the child-raising department. There are a lot of things I don’t do well, and a few I do very badly, but I think I’ve been a good parent, particularly in the last decade or so. There’s quite a bit of on-the-job training involved in parenting — hardly any other kind, in fact — and I think I was better at it when I finished than when I started. I’m sure my older children would second that, perhaps with more vigor than I’d like.

If I could pass on a bit of advice, it would be on the important topic of saying “no” to your children.

Attorney General Bill Barr agreed to speak with Fox News host Bill Hemmer during a trip to meet with El Salvador officials to support their efforts in dealing with Justice issues of concern to both the US and El Salvador (e.g., MS-13 gang). According to Hemmer, it was Bill Barr’s first interview in nearly 20 years.

Fox aired the approximately 20-minute interview in small increments interspersed throughout their May 17 “America’s Newsroom” morning broadcast, but I found this uninterrupted audio version.

She’s stubborn as all get out. When she makes a plan, she sticks with it and won’t let anyone interfere. She argues with us incessantly, and when we go against her wishes, she reluctantly goes along, but only after several protests. She always wants to go back to her original plan. And she is so polite, too; it’s very annoying to see that nothing ruffles her. But most of the time we defer to her: after all, what do a couple of old geezers know about these things?!

So who is Sophia? She is our GPS system. Not the name we gave our GPS system, she is the system. We have Android Auto in our car, and sometimes I’d like to throttle Google.

She was house sitting, that week, as memory serves. The teacher’s home had an adobe-style wall fencing in a plethora of dogwoods and cherry, plum and almond with an occasional Japanese maple thrown in. There were hydrangeas and rhubarb, the stalks of irises, and some jonquils so newly yellow peeking out from behind some type of vegetation.

When Ricochet member @andrewklavan posted about his new book called The Great Good Thing – A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, I was curious. I was curious why he took a little flack from a few Jewish members of Ricochet when he posted about his new book, who didn’t feel he gave Judaism a fair shake. But that’s not why I ordered the book. As a Christian, I was born into the faith, but came to a more personal faith backward and sideways, sometimes kicking and screaming. I was curious to hear about another person’s journey of faith – was it worse than mine?

So I ordered it and threw it up on my bookshelf for another day. Published in 2016, I am three years late in picking it up, but not really. I read it at the perfect time. There are times in a person’s life when a book like this is profound and quite frankly, more appreciated, than other times. The recent deaths of people I love and thoughts about mortality and immortality flowing through my mind, rapidly changing world events, including challenges to people of faith, especially Christians and Jews, with the dramatic rise in antisemitism, religious persecution across the world, and the upcoming peace talks in Israel made it the right time.

Australia went to the polls yesterday, and the result has the pundits in shock this morning. A Labor Party victory was widely expected after polls had indicated for well over a year that the country had soured on the right-leaning Liberal Party (yes, we’re talking classical liberalism Down Under) coalition. Conventional wisdom seemed to have coalesced around the idea that this was a change election. Not so much, it turned out.

I grew up in the 50s in the blue-collar city of Compton, California, just before it turned dangerous. I spent my youth in pool halls and bowling alleys. I had no interest in school. To make money, I delivered newspapers, set pins in the bowling alley, kept score, and even shined shoes in dive bars on Compton Boulevard. I was drafted into the Army in 1958 and spent 18 months in Germany, where I started thinking hard about what I wanted to do with my life. So I returned to Compton Junior College f… [more]

There may be a lesson in human behavior from the addiction of Bob the dog to a device called Dogness. Or maybe not. Actually, I’m not sure I’ll find a moral before I end this post. Wish me luck.

Marie and I will be taking a cruise around the Mediterranean in a couple of months, and I wanted to give Bob some comfort while we’re gone. He’s a terribly needy dog with a severe case of separation anxiety. The lady across the street is going to come to the house twice a day to look to Bob while we’re gone, but I know Bob will still miss us. To ease his distress, then, I bought Dogness, the treat-dispensing device you see to your right.

“You are wrong and your God is wrong.” A statement that a committed Catholic, Christian, or Jew might hear in China, North Korea, or in any number of countries, but not in Canada, and not from a judge.

Mary Wagner may be known in Canada, and in the United States among pro-life advocates, but she is well known in Poland. Poland is under pressure from the EU to liberalize their abortion laws. Poland is also under pressure to repeal a mandatory retirement age for judges, a law that was written to remove judges that were hearing cases during the Soviet occupation of Poland. As one writer put it, Poland was not impressed with the old totalitarians, and they are not impressed with the new totalitarians. Mary Wagner has been honored with a postage stamp in Poland.

Socialism is the Democratic Party’s hot “new” direction, though there seems to be some disagreement about just what “socialism” means. Whether it’s “only” a vastly expanded welfare state tacked onto a capitalist economic engine or whether the government takes ownership of the economy’s “commanding heights” is yet to be determined. Either way, the vision entails government redistribution of wealth to ensure that it is more equitably allotted.

But will redistribution really result in more equality? It might, in the sense that the richer will likely be made poorer, but more redistribution will certainly result in more corruption. The issue is one of incentives. What incentives do the following economic actors have?

"She can milk She brews good ale She can sew She can knit She can wash and scour She can spin She hath many nameless virtues . . ." She is a recovering IT professional living on a farm in Southwestern Pennsylvania with a numerous sheep, goats, rabbits, cats, dogs, and a long-suffering husband.

I love a nice bowl of curry! Unfortunately, I get the same reaction to those words in my married-into family as I get when I exclaim “I love a nice piece of fruitcake!” So to indulge myself, it’s necessary to either go out with friends who share similar tastes, or to hook up, one way or another, with my brother and sister in the UK so that we can have a pig-out. (The Worcestershire area has some very nice Balti restaurants (I prefer the beef), and some of the better Indian restaurants, which offer more of a variety, do lovely curries. I’m not a fan of “curry and chips.” Nor of most “fish and chips” as they manifest themselves in the land of my birth, either, but that’s a whole nother story).

In the matter of curry, I’m pretty indifferent to, and catholic in my tastes, as far as the country of origin and heat output. A nice Thai panang (red or green curry), or Kiang Som Kung (sour shrimp curry) is scrumptious. Vindaloo, ramped up to a heat scale of about nine out of ten is delicious, as is Makhani, a mild chicken dish. Stretching the definition a bit, I’ll throw in a nice jambalaya here as well. The common factor with most curries, worldwide is rice, although the varieties change from place to place–plain long-grain, basmati, jasmine and so on. The subtle flavor of the rice enhances the spices in the curry, or in the case of plain rice, provides a nice contrast, and it’s important to use the right one for the right dish. Or so I think.

In this Conversation, businessman and best-selling author Edward Conard shares his perspective on how America can can sustain economic growth, spur innovation, improve productivity, and ensure greater prosperity for the middle class.. Conard counters the commonplace view, today, that the American middle class has been hollowed out and that economic mobility has stagnated. While recognizing a slowdown in productivity and growth in recent years, Conard considers the overall strength and diversity of the American economy, and the relative growth in middle-class incomes in America compared to peer groups in Europe as well as Japan. According to Conard, we must prioritize innovation and growth in order to meet today’s challenges—and he cites America’s opportunity to increase high-skilled immigration as the single best way to jumpstart innovation and productivity now and in the years to come.

Men who become women, transgender if you like, are simply appropriating the female appearance. Without the proper body functions, this is only a surface change. It is a change in the appearance, not in the genetic material that makes a woman female. Some of the hormones may be added or subtracted, sure, however, it does not mean having a truly female experience.

Transgender women never have a first period. They never have the worry about being pregnant; either that they are or that they’re not. They never have the joy of wondering just how normal their anatomical bits are: they are scientifically implanted or grown and adjusted according to spec. They never grow up with the fear of men.

Smith didn’t look up from the chess problem he had set up on the board in front of him, but only grimaced in a way that meant that I had just asked a stupid question. To my right, another fellow said, “Oh, Camper! I was so absorbed in this book I didn’t even see you come in. Shouldn’t you be home with that beautiful wife of yours at this time of the morning?”

Michael Ramirez is a two-time winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1994 and 2008 and a three-time Sigma Delta Chi, Society of Professional Journalism Award winner. He is a Senior Editor and the editorial cartoonist for Investor's Business Daily. Ramirez is a Lincoln Fellow, an honorary member of Pi Sigma Alpha National Political Science Honor Society, and has won almost every journalism award in addition to the prestigious UCI Medal from the University of California, Irvine and the 2005 N… [more]

Dad. Writes on culture, economics and business issues; published in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and others. Interviewed on Fox News, Fox Business, CNNfn, & numerous radio shows. Purveyor at Whiskey Politics: Conversations with newsmakers on politics & culture. Guest Host on The Real Side Radio (52 terrestrial stations on GSN Network). Whiskey Politics is found at Ricochet, America's Voice News Television or by subscribing at iTunes, Stitcher, GooglePlay, & YouTube. F… [more]

Liberal media, double standards; same song, different verse. We already knew HBO promotes leftist propaganda, whether it’s Vice, Bill Maher, John Oliver, or ensuring its Game of Thrones middle-earth soap opera is diverse enough for their woke overlords. When Vanity Fair Contributing Editor (liberal author) Fran Lebowitz stated to Maher’s barking seal audience that impeachment was not enough for President Trump she added that he “deserves to be handed over to the Saudis” to face the same treatment as the late journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was brutally killed and dismembered.